The Day the Kakistocracy Tripped Over Its Own Feet

How Trump’s fake prosecutors, bad appointments, and worse lawyering blew up the Comey and James cases

If you ever needed a clean case study in kakistocracy, government by the worst, dumbest, and least qualified people available, today’s ruling out of Virginia delivers it in hardcover.

A federal judge has just tossed the indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, not because the evidence was weak (it was), and not because the grand jury process was a circus (it was that too), but because the Trump regime literally could not figure out how to legally appoint the person they sent in to prosecute them. The authoritarian project tripped over its own shoelaces on the courthouse steps.

The judge, Cameron McGowan Currie, sitting by designation from South Carolina, ruled that Trump loyalist Lindsey Halligan was never lawfully appointed as interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Because Halligan had no legal authority to hold that job, she had no authority to step into a grand jury room, no authority to sign an indictment, and no authority to drag Trump’s political enemies into criminal court. Every action she took in that role was, in Currie’s words, an unlawful exercise of executive power and is “hereby set aside.”

The underlying law is not exotic. Under 28 U.S.C. § 546, you get one interim U.S. attorney per vacancy, for a short, finite period. After roughly 120 days, if the Senate hasn’t confirmed a permanent nominee, the local federal judges can extend that same interim’s tenure to keep the office running. The statute is designed to stop exactly what Trump tried to do here: cycling through handpicked political enforcers indefinitely while never subjecting them to Senate scrutiny.

In the Eastern District of Virginia, Trump had already used his one shot. His first interim U.S. attorney was Erik Siebert, a Republican career prosecutor. The judges liked him enough to extend his term, and even the Democratic senators from Virginia were prepared to support his confirmation. Siebert’s problem wasn’t competence; it’s that he refused to bring half-baked indictments against Trump’s favorite enemies. When Siebert wouldn’t criminalize Comey and James on command, Trump pushed him out and, in true Trump fashion, decided the real problem was not enough loyalty.

What followed was classic Trump: instead of nominating a qualified U.S. attorney and getting them confirmed, he tried to install Lindsey Halligan, a beauty pageant contestant turned insurance lawyer turned Trump personal attorney, as the new “interim” U.S. attorney, after his lawful interim was already in place and extended. That’s not how the Appointments Clause works. Once Siebert was ousted, the power to fill the vacancy shifted to the judges, not to Pam Bondi and her political to-do list. Currie’s ruling says that out loud: Halligan’s appointment violated both § 546 and the Constitution, and everything that flowed from it is void.

NBC reporting fills in how nakedly political this whole operation was. Before Halligan’s stunt, prosecutors in the office had already recommended against charging either Comey or James because the evidence was too weak to secure a conviction. That’s when Trump took to Truth Social with what was supposedly meant as a private “direct message” to Attorney General Pam Bondi, but went out publicly instead. In it, he raged that “nothing is being done” about Comey, “Shifty” Schiff, and “Leticia,” and fretted that the lack of prosecutions was “killing our reputation and credibility.” Five days later, Halligan, who had never served as a federal prosecutor, marched alone into the grand jury to indict Comey just before the five-year statute of limitations expired.

Alone is the key word here. In a normal universe, the U.S. attorney is the figurehead; line prosecutors, assistant U.S. attorneys, actually present cases to the grand jury. Here, Halligan was the lone lawyer in the room and the only signer on the indictments for both Comey and James. No career prosecutor would touch these cases, so Trump’s people sent in the only person willing to do it: a loyalist with no experience and, as we now know, no lawful authority.

And that’s before you even get to the “extra credit” misconduct. As MeidasTouch has been documenting, Halligan’s grand jury performance was its own mini-disaster. Among the problems already flagged in court filings and hearings:

She allegedly gave false legal instructions to the grand jury about Fifth Amendment rights and shifted the burden as if Comey had to prove his innocence. She put on an FBI agent who had been exposed to attorney–client privileged information, rendering his testimony tainted. She obtained what amounted to a second indictment after the first was rejected, then had only the foreperson sign off instead of actually re-presenting it to the full grand jury. At one point Judge Currie herself pointed to a nearly two-hour gap in the grand jury transcript and remarked that it looked like no court reporter had been present at all.

In other words, even if Halligan had been lawfully appointed, the Comey case was wobbling on the edge already. Currie never had to reach any of that. She stopped at the front door: Halligan shouldn’t have been in the room to begin with.

One of the most important practical details is the “without prejudice” language. Currie dismissed both indictments without prejudice, which means that in theory the Justice Department could refile the cases as long as the statute of limitations hasn’t run. But the timing matters. Comey was indicted on the very last possible day of the limitations period. Now that the indictment is gone, the clock has expired. There is no time left to refile, for Comey, this case is effectively over.

Letitia James is in a different procedural posture. The limitations period on her charges has not fully run yet. So on paper, a properly appointed U.S. attorney could walk into a grand jury and try again. On planet Earth, that would require some poor soul to risk their bar license by resuscitating a prosecution that:

Internal Trump-era lawyers already said was too weak. Housing and Fair Housing officials reportedly wrote internal memos saying no crimes were committed and were then pushed out for it. The original indictment is now publicly branded as the product of an unlawfully appointed, unqualified partisan loyalist.

Who is going to volunteer for that? If Bondi or Todd Blanche truly believe in the case, they’re welcome to lead by example and present it themselves. You will notice they are not sprinting toward that opportunity.

The ruling is also a constitutional brick to the face of the Trump DOJ’s broader strategy. This isn’t just about Lindsey Halligan. It slots into a growing line of decisions where courts have told Trump that he cannot run the Justice Department like a family business with cosplay prosecutors.

In New Jersey, Judge Matthew Brann ruled that Alina Habba, another Trump personal lawyer repurposed as an interim U.S. attorney, was serving “without lawful authority” after the administration tried to stretch her 120-day interim appointment past the breaking point, then fired the court-approved replacement to shoehorn her back in. In California, a federal judge recently found that Bill Essayli, Trump’s acting U.S. attorney in the Central District, was also unlawfully serving, making him the third Trump-installed top prosecutor declared illegal in just a few months. Nevada has its own version of the same story, with another Trump-picked U.S. attorney disqualified from multiple cases for not validly holding the office.

Spot the pattern. Over and over, Trump and Bondi have tried to game the appointments process, ignoring the constitutional requirement of Senate confirmation and blowing past statutory limits in order to keep a rotating cast of loyalists in charge of criminal prosecutions. Over and over, judges, including plenty appointed by Republicans, have said no.

Currie’s order also slams the door on Bondi’s attempt to paper over all of this after the fact. In November, Bondi filed declarations claiming she had reviewed the grand jury transcripts and retroactively “ratified” Halligan’s conduct, everything from the tainted witness to the dubious indictment handling to the wrong-headed legal instructions. Currie held that this kind of after-the-fact blessing doesn’t magically convert an unlawful appointment into a lawful one. If anything, Bondi has now personally signed her name to the mess. If state bars ever get serious about accountability for attorneys general, those declarations are Exhibit A.

There is, of course, an appeal coming. DOJ under Trump will run to the Fourth Circuit, and if they lose there, they’ll aim at the Supreme Court. But the statute is painfully clear, the facts are egregious, and even before this ruling appellate watchers were openly predicting a loss. When you’ve already used your one interim and the district’s judges have extended his tenure, you don’t get to fire him for refusing to do political hit jobs and then pretend the vacancy magically resets for your next loyalist.

Zooming out, today’s decision is not just a procedural “gotcha.” It’s a rare moment where the system actually enforces the idea that prosecutors must have legitimate authority before they can drag people into criminal court, especially when those people are political enemies of the president. The Appointments Clause exists for exactly this reason: to stop a president from filling key offices with unconfirmable cronies and calling that the rule of law.

That doesn’t mean the damage is undone. Comey and James both spent months under indictment. They will almost certainly sue for malicious prosecution, and when they do, it won’t be Donald Trump or Pam Bondi paying those settlements. It will be the taxpayers, you, me, and everyone who got to watch the federal government become an expensive cosplay stage for Trump’s grievances. As Meidas pointed out, the Trump DOJ has effectively turned into a “prosecution for enemies, protection for friends” machine, all while insisting this is what “law and order” looks like.

So yes, this ruling is good news. It’s a real judicial rebuke, and it effectively ends the Comey case while leaving the James case hanging in a kind of radioactive limbo no sane prosecutor will approach. But it is also another chapter in the same story: an aspiring authoritarian surrounded by loyalists who are both ruthless and incompetent, trying to bend the system to their will and repeatedly discovering that the paperwork they sneer at actually matters.

Kakistocracy isn’t just evil; it’s sloppy. And occasionally, as Judge Currie just reminded them, the sloppiness is what brings the whole structure crashing down.